I hope some of you have had a chance to read (and hopefully enjoy) my new column called 'PTO for the Rest of Us'. The January column describes, at a high level, what I hope to accomplish. I'll start a new thread each month to give readers a place to chat about the column. And I'll be really sad if no one has any questions, thoughts, or comments.

Partially I agree with you that the system should be optimized by traditional means, such as index optimization, improving T-SQL logic in spocs, before pulling out a blank Purchase Order to upgrade the hardware.

However to make your point, you are exagerating the cost of HW upgrade to several hundred thousands dollars, ignoring that one can upgrade a server for as little as $10K.

Naturally I am in favor of database optimization as an on going duty of a DBA. However, since HW prices dropping and technology advances, I am also in favor of hardware upgrades. Not only you get better performance, but you get new "iron" which is less likely to break down (as opposed to 3-5 year old server).

There are limits to optimization:

1. Skill of DBA. It requires a senior DBA to do good optimization.

2. Political issue of throwing back slow queries/sprocs to the development department and QA.

3. In case of 3rd party software, only index optimization can be applied. Even that may become a political or licensing issue.